The problem with material-ui is that a lot of their components don't follow material design guidelines like their tables for example. It looks good, but it's not material. react-mdl is much closer to material, but incomplete due to missing components. Angular seems to have the best implementation so far, but I'm looking forward to material-design-lite v2

re:learned a lot about how to build reusable components myself from their API

material-ui's tutorials are really bad examples on this. They teach you to import from specific dir path inside material-ui. (e.g. import Pen from 'material-ui/lib/pen' or whatever)

Instead, they should recommend: import { Pen } from 'material-ui' since most of their exports are already in material-ui/src/index.js file (or some index.js file from package.json's main part)

I was put off by their TextField implementation. Their oversized <input> element doesn't play well with browsers, eg. the browser's auto-complete looks completely out of space.